


Death, Reversed

by altmodes



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Assassination Plot(s), Corporate Espionage, Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Haunted Houses, Horror, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 12:33:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 5,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10809087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altmodes/pseuds/altmodes
Summary: Corvo doesn't know how to start a new life with Emily while he's still trying to protect her from Jessamine's killers, but a dilapidated house in a forgotten part of Dunwall is a good enough place for them to stay quiet and unassuming for a while.Or it might have been, until Emily starts drawing pictures of her friend with black eyes, and Corvo hears footsteps in the house.





	1. Six of Swords

**Author's Note:**

> General warnings/notes: Horror, drowning motifs, death / murder / etc. Some gore. Paranoia and the overall implications of being watched by a mercurial ghost. Trauma, PTSD, grief.
> 
> Intro notes will have chapter by chapter warnings for explicit content (nsfw, gore, other troubling stuff) and specifics.
> 
> Not sure how nsfw future chapters will get, notes/tags/etc will be updated accordingly.
> 
> WIP / ongoing. I wrote the first seven chapters in a sitting or two and plan to keep working when I have time outside of work. I have literally no idea how long this will be.

Emily sits on the floor in the parlor, tracing the impressions of the old floorboards into her sketchbook pages with charcoal.

She wanted to play outside when they first stepped out of the carriage to the house, 1 Auldstone Place: it’s moving day, and even the grime-washed face of the old house and the ugly cobblestone street can’t dim a little girl’s enthusiasm for adventure. Part of Corvo expects to find her missing each time he comes down the staircase to take another of their suitcases into the house-- run off on her own or worse, he doesn’t know. But she’s there every time. Scribbling and shuffling papers. He’ll have to figure out where they packed the nails to put up her pictures later.

Corvo has missed seeing Em excited, even if he’s not sure how long it will last.

He’d taken her to one of the new silvergraph shows yesterday while the men he’d hired were bringing in the furniture. It was a luxury-- the show _and_ the furniture-- but worth it in the end. She deserved something nice, after everything she’s been through: Jessamine, the funeral, the constant paranoia and hotel rooms and secret carriages. Corvo casts another glance into the parlor to check on Emily, fighting off the tingling fear in the back of his throat, and drags the last of their luggage into the house. He smiles at the sight of her, drawing aimlessly, and hoists the trunk up to chest height so it will fit up the narrow staircase.

His whole body is aching with the weight of the luggage he’s lugged through the house today, each trunk weighted down with memories, and a few other things. The whole house feels empty-- rotting yellow-paisley wallpaper exposing old boards, creaking floorboards, hollowed-out rooms with barren furniture left askew by the movers he’d hired-- but the trunks are a touch of life in the place. The only touch of life, spare Emily and himself, and the rats.

Emily’s things are the lightest, with her play clothes, polite-society dresses in the fashions of the season that she’ll probably never wear before she outgrows them, too many dirty shoes, sketchbooks and picturebooks and schoolbooks, and a menagerie of cloth animals and dolls and trinkets. Everything worn and smeared with the love of a child’s fingers or untouched and ignored.

Then Jessamine’s things: not all of them, but meticulously packed. Waiting for Emily to grow up, maybe just to remember her mother, or to inherit something more of her legacy. Corvo thought about putting them in the attic, but both the risk of moths and the gesture itself gnaws at him. Jess’ trunk stays at the foot of his bed, locked and unpacked.

The other trunks and suitcases-- Corvo supposes they’re his-- are heavy and various. Clothing, often as padding; guns; ammunition; books, unfortunately, and records. Not too much silver or gold. Only enough for emergencies. Everything else is stored in caches across the city.

Corvo dwells on his thoughts as he lets the last suitcase down on the floor of… well, this the study now, maybe. The workmen saw fit to leave a desk here, and there’s a window with good daylight, so if he’ll have to learn how to avoid being conned by every barrister he meets for Em’s sake, it might as well be in here.

He rolls his shoulder and digs in his fingers to untangle the tension in the fibers of his muscles, and for a moment he loses himself. (He’s not sure how long ‘a moment’ is. The daylight creeping across the room doesn’t change too much, anyway.) In the windowpane across the room, Corvo catches his own reflection, staring vacant-eyed back into the distance at himself. He looks away.

He hurries downstairs. It’s too quiet on the upper floor: the house is on a back street tucked into a city wall, nowhere near any of the main thoroughfares, and when the windows are shut it’s like the whole place is holding its breath. With Emily out of sight-- with the shabby just past the entryway to the house, just a picked or jammed door lock and two rooms away from the street-- Corvo feels a sense of dread he can’t dislodge from his throat until he makes it down to see her. Dread and an endless guilt.

And once he circles around the bottom of the staircases, and turns down the end of the hallway, there she is-- no longer tracing the wood patterns of the parlor floor, now sketching something he can’t make out. Her back is to him, but she turns to look when she hears his heavy footsteps at the entryway to the room.

“Corvo! Are you finally done?” Emily wipes her charcoal-stained hands on her moving skirt (already stained) as she hops up to her feet. Corvo couldn’t care any less about the state of her dress. “I thought you were never going to be done with suitcases.”

“Yeah.” Corvo finds himself smiling. “Finally. Your things are in your room. I still need to move some of the furniture around.”

“I’ll help,” Emily decides for him. “But not today. Can we go for a walk? What kind of shops are there here? I don’t recognize this part of town at all, is this across the Wrenhaven from home?”

“Mm,” Corvo answers, or perhaps doesn’t.

They _are_ across the Wrenhaven from the magnificent old Kaldwin house in the estate district-- in Emily’s name now, he’s got the deed upstairs in a safe-- and half the city away from that life besides. Emily is perceptive as always. But the shops here, such as they are, aren’t any that Corvo wants her browsing on a lazy afternoon. He reconnoitered the neighborhood before he bought the house: it’s as quiet as you can expect, not deep in Bottle Street territory and not in the thick of crime. But it _is_ Dunwall, after all.

“We can’t go out right now, Emily,” Corvo says, and regrets it, even though that doesn’t change his mind. “Maybe in a few weeks.”

Emily doesn’t answer right away. “Because of Mother.”

Perceptive as always, Corvo thinks. “Yes.”

Emily nods, and bends down again to shuffle her papers into a stack. “Alright. I’m unpacking then.” Corvo tries not to take it personally when she rushes up the stairs, her flats clacking on every other step. If she doesn’t want to spend every second with him, then she wants to be alone.

He sighs, and looks down at where she had been sitting on the parlor floor, sketching with her pencils.

Smeared in the charcoal dust against the floorboards is a word, in crude, capital letters: _**CORVO**_.


	2. Three of Swords

Corvo claws his way out of sleep, his clothes sticking to him with sweat. He’s freezing; he must have kicked his blankets away.

For a long while in the dark-- minutes, he doesn’t know-- he’s somewhere between here and that yawning black, where he couldn’t keep hold of Jessamine’s hand, and over and over she tumbled into the nothing. In his bed now, in the dark, Corvo rubs his fingers to try to brush off the blood he expects to find there, but all he feels is cold.

After a while, he breathes again. It feels wrong. Being here feels wrong. It aches in his chest.

Corvo gets up, and cringes as the bedframe creaks under his movement, but the blanket he’d kicked to the floor muffles his footsteps partway to the window across the room. Closed and locked still. He unlatches it, and the familiar air of Dunwall seeps in: brine, smoke, oil, and in this side of town, miscellaneous trash. It’s cool this time of night, but not cold. There’s no accounting for the chill in the room.

The view from the window isn’t spectacular, but it’s not bad. Corvo can’t see the river from here-- that’s the point-- but the rooftops are charming to him in their own way. It’s nothing like what he remembers of Karnaca; especially this side of town and in this nighttime gloom, with only the moonlight to define them, the rooftops are a jagged puzzlework of gray and necessity. But it’s comforting to look out on the city somehow. To see that some things haven’t changed, despite it all.

Behind him, the bed creaks.

Corvo turns his head, then his shoulders away from the window, letting what little light there is filter into the room. “Em, what’s got you awake?”

He has to squint a little to see into the darkness of the room after the comparative brightness of starlight outside, but as he steps closer to Em and his eyes focus, he realizes there’s no shape to make out on the bed at all.

Corvo is alone in the room.

He feels very cold again.

He turns and closes the window with a loud snap of the pane-- louder than he intends-- and with much softer footsteps he makes his way out of his bedroom and through the hallway. Even with only a week in the house, he has every passageway, every turn memorized; the way from his room to Emily’s is burned in his mind. He turns the handle to her door as gently as he can and pushes it open, afraid at once to open it and of what-- of what?-- of what he might see when he does.

Inside the room, her dark hair spilling out over her face, Emily is asleep on her pillow. He can see her breathing, slow and peaceful.

Corvo closes the door.

He doesn’t sleep again that night.


	3. Seven of Pentacles

The morning is grim, with the threat of rain glowering down from the low-hanging clouds along with the gray light. The puddles from the storms of the last few days are still in the street, and Corvo has to step around them as he makes his way back to the house, weaving through strangers with the groceries for the next few days pulled close to his chest.

He doesn’t like to leave the house at all, not without someone else with Emily; but he doesn’t know anyone he trusts with the address, or with _her_ , and he doesn’t want to risk her face on the street yet. It’s still so soon. (Will it ever stop feeling _soon_? Like it all just happened yesterday, a week ago, like he’s still trying to find his footing…?)

It’s only been a few hours, Corvo tells himself-- three hours. They do have to eat, and he couldn’t set up grocery deliveries without going out eventually. He’ll be home soon.

Corvo traces a wandering route home but walking with purpose, crossing his way around passersby in the thick of Olmsby Avenue, through narrow sidestreets and back over his own steps again. He’s never had a reason to be familiar with this side of town, but he’s learning to be now. He has to be sure not to be followed. The precious minutes it costs him tick by in his mind, as loud as a real clock.

When Corvo finally turns the corner, he’s relieved to see the house, like he’s broken the surface of water he didn’t know he was beneath. He thinks, sardonically, he might be one of the first to be happy to see the place. The house-- 1 Auldstone Place-- might have been respectable once, a century ago: since then it has sunk into its foundation and the city wall behind it under the weight of its own age and history, whatever that might be. The walls are brick, stained black with years of grime, and most of the windows of the bottom floor are boarded up. For some years-- decades, maybe-- the house seems to have convalesced between ‘lodged’ and ‘abandoned’, just in-between enough to keep out squatters and to slowly diminish in upkeep over the years.

Corvo has few, if any, plans to make improvements-- at least not outside the house.

No, what appeals most to Corvo about 1 Auldstone Place is just how inhospitable it looks. Like a crag in a storm.

Right now, though, he couldn’t be happier to be back. Heaving his bags into one arm, he passes the front door to go to the back instead. There, he undoes the locks on the servants’ door, and closes it after himself.

Before he can open his mouth to call out for Emily-- in fact while he’s still re-latching the door-- he cuts himself off.

Emily is talking. He can’t make out the words, but it’s not play-chatter or a sing-a-long, it’s-- _conversation_.

An apple thumps and rolls across the floorboards, clunking into the solid wood basement door, before the rest of his bags hit the ground. He barely hears his footsteps as he dashes across the house, trying to find the sound of Emily’s voice, over the river-rush pounding of blood in his head. He turns a corner, a hand on the bannister of the stairway as he stares up it, and he hears her voice behind him, confused but clear like a piano note:

“Corvo?”

“Emily,” he sighs, but his face and pulse don’t catch up with the relief in his voice. His eyes dart away from her, and he steps past her, towards the front door just past her. “Who’s here? Who are you talking to?”

Emily laughs. “I was playing games.”

Corvo pauses, not satisfied. “I heard you talking--”

“It’s alright, Corvo. I was just playing hide and seek and guessing games while you were gone.”

“With who?”

Emily laughs again. “With nobody.”

Corvo frowns. He was already frowning. He frowns more.

Emily stands on her tiptoes to prod his shoulder. “Did you actually go shopping? Where did you go? Where is everything?”

“Oh,” Corvo says. “Yes, it’s in the kitchen.”

“Oooh,” Emily says, and scampers off, leaving Corvo to think.


	4. Two of Pentacles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Blood, possible self-harm implications

Emily looks almost as busy at her work as Corvo does, when she notices he’s looking at her. She’s clever, and good at putting up an act, keeping her history book open and turning the pages occasionally, but it’s obvious she doesn’t want to be reading. The page she’s supposed to be writing on-- _supposed_ to be-- is as covered in doodles as it is in her proper notes when he squints to make it out. Whenever Corvo turns his head to look toward where she’s sprawled on the floor beside his desk, though, she quickly starts a new line of notes: _The “Morley Insurrection” happened in 1801 and…_

He’s not sure he can blame her. He was never really a student, and it’d be a lie to call himself a teacher now. Emily’s education has been a problem he’s been turning over in his mind for a few days now, and it continues to tease at his thoughts every few minutes like a kitten pulling at a loose thread, but the paperwork on his desk dominates his attention.

Most prominent among the papers is a few sheets of plain white letter; underneath, notes from barristers-- his own (Emily’s) and others-- and various legal documents. He can’t even pretend to understand the intricacies, however many times he’s read them all. He picks one up, almost thoughtlessly, but doesn’t reread it again: he knows what it says. Another proposal by Burrows, acting through an agent, to buy out Emily’s stake in Kaldwin Bottling Company. In other words, a threat. Corvo is smart enough to know that much.

Hiram Burrows’ hands have been bloody from the start. That was obvious: it was only luck that Corvo had managed to get Emily away safely, and that Burrows’ agents hadn’t been able to trick or bribe their way to finding Jessamine’s will and company documents before Corvo could reclaim them. Otherwise… well, he wouldn’t be reading threatening legal letters from that bastard now, that was for sure.

Corvo lets the letter fall to the desk once more, and the world slowly comes back into focus.

His papers are covered in a pool of blood, soaking into them and spreading out slowly. He’s too shocked to make a sound.

A wave of faintness passes over him, like heat off the ground in the Karnaca summertime. When he opens his eyes, there’s no blood-- only ink, pooling from the tip of his pin where it’s pressed into the sheets of letter paper. The stain widens centimeter by centimeter into a black pool. Corvo lets out a shaky breath and drops the pen-- it’s louder than he expects-- and crumples up the once-blank letters, careful to keep them away from the documents.

He shoves the paper to one side of his desk, rubbing his palm against his other forearm. The feel of blood on his skin is too common lately, true or not.

Corvo looks down at Emily when he feels able, and feels his nails dig into his arm.

“Emily,” he asks, softly, “who is that?”

Her notes on the Morley Insurrection have been devoured, swallowed up by a man in charcoal: a line for a mouth, dark-haired, with two wide, black eyes. Black like pools of ink. Emily is sketching out a picture of herself beside him, with a wide smile on her smaller self’s face.

“Oh,” Emily says, turning over a new page immediately and starting a new line: _The position of Royal Protector was created because of…_ as if nothing was wrong except for her minor misdemeanor. “He’s just a friend of mine.”

Corvo feels as if he’s swallowed ice. “Where did you meet him?”

“Just playing pretend. He’s not really anyone.”

“And what’s his name?”

“He doesn’t really have one. I just _said_ he’s not real, Corvo.”

“So how do you know what he looks like?”

Emily gives him an exasperated look, as only a child her age can. “How do you know what anyone looks like?”

Corvo doesn’t like that answer any more than he knows what it means, but he’s not sure what else there is to say.

He picks up his pen once more-- his hand wasn’t covered in ink before, was it? It must have been, though, probably from the spill-- and pulls out another sheet of white paper. This time, he starts out immediately, and with purpose:

**_Dear Ms. Curnow,_**


	5. Page of Wands

Emily hasn’t stopped talking when she’s alone. Whether it’s to herself or to someone else, Corvo hasn’t been sure; it isn’t to him, that much he knows. The sound of it echoes quietly through the house, whispering up the stairwell when he’s a floor above her, echoing around corners when he’s in another room.

When Callista Curnow, Emily’s new governess, moves in, it becomes a little more bearable. At least now _most_ of the time, it’s her that Emily is talking to and giggling with; and if it isn’t, then Corvo can pretend.

Maybe the part that scares him the most is the fact that Emily keeps insisting that she’s just pretending, or that she won’t tell him that she isn’t. Or maybe what scares him is that he’s stopped searching every room on the floor whenever he hears Emily’s voice and no one else’s. Corvo can’t be sure what he thinks anymore.

He expected to feel trepidation when Callista first arrived with her two suitcases. All he felt was relief-- like he could finally sit down at the end of a day. Corvo doesn’t know if it’s that he trusts her, really, but the act of confiding-- or at least of having another set of eyes on Emily, rather than this worry gnawing like rat’s teeth-- is more than nothing. He doesn’t know if there’s anyone else he could come closer to trusting, at any rate. He saved her uncle’s life once-- the only family she has. Some people would still sell that out for enough money, but Corvo doesn’t think Callista would. He supposes they’ll find out.

At any rate, there’s not much chance of getting Emily to sit down to read a book otherwise.

Callista had suggested, sweetly, that Emily might take to her lessons more if Corvo followed along with some of them, if there was no avoiding each other in the house anyway. He had no reason not to oblige, so he had a few extra books shipped to skim through while they did lessons in the second floor reading room, where the lighting was best. Emily, as usual, was on the ground; Callista kept to her chair. Corvo also stuck to a chair, but he found himself whittling behind his book as often as not. Em took after him more than Jess in that regard, he had to admit.

“Let’s review,” Callista says. It’s not a question.

“Alright.” Emily seems delighted by the idea of finishing the lesson sooner rather than later.

“When did the Insurrection of Morley start?”

“1801. And it lasted until 1803.”

“Good. And what were some of the reasons for it?”

“Morley wanted independence after merchants stole from them.”

“Alright. What was the Insurrection exactly?”

Emily seems stumped by this question. “There were a lot of naval battles, like with ships. And people trying to murder empresses. And spies.”

“Correct. What empress was assassinated?”

Emily seems daunted by this, and doesn’t come up with a name.

“Empress Larisa Olaskir,” Corvo offers, watching Emily thoughtfully.

“Thank you, Corvo. Empress Larisa Olaskir was killed at the beginning of the Morley Insurrection. Her murderer hoped to provoke the war.”

“Oh,” Emily says. “Right.”

Callista continues, undeterred. “And what major change in the Royal Court did this lead--”

“The creation of the Royal Protector,” Corvo responds, again. Emily’s face is a small raincloud, unreadable and troubling. “Maybe we should take a break for now.”

“Very well,” Callista agrees, but she doesn’t seem so certain. Emily doesn’t answer immediately, or as gleefully as Corvo would like. “Do you want to play a game of nancy, Emily?”

“Oh,” Emily blinks, and sits up. “Alright.”

Callista pulls a deck out of the bag she carries with her, tied with a loose cord. Emily takes it before she can deal any cards.

“Can I look?” she asks, flipping through some of the cards.

“Of course you may.”

There’s a minute of silence, the quiet sounds of cards slipping past each other as Emily flips through them. Corvo glances at her now and then over his book; he’s not really reading much at all. “Let’s play a different game,” she decides, and shuffles the deck once, then twice.

Emily places a card face down. “Guess what card it is.”

“What?” Callista asks.

“Guess the card!”

Callista pauses, looking from Emily-- suddenly animated-- back to the card. “Uh, four of wands.”

Emily flips the card over. “Four of cups. Close! Now you put one face down.”

Callista pauses again, then does as she’s asked, drawing a card and placing it face down by the knight.

Emily pauses for a moment. “That’s the eight of swords.” She flips the card.

The familiar eight of swords-- a man bound and blindfolded, surrounded by swords-- sits between the two of them. Emily smiles.

Callista doesn’t have time to react before Emily places another card down. “Your turn.”

“I -- um -- the Fool,” Callista tries.

Emily turns the card over and giggles. “Knight of Cups! You go.”

Corvo isn’t reading anything, but his hands are digging dents into the pages as he watches the supposed game.

Callista slowly places a card on the small stack.

Emily takes a breath. “The High Priestess.” She turns the card over.

Even from where he’s sitting, Corvo can see the tiny priestess on the card, seated and robed, just enough of her pagan iconography obscured by the strictures she’s holding to be permissible.

Callista doesn’t respond. She doesn’t move, either.

Emily puts another card down. “The World.” She flips the card: it is.

“Emily.” Corvo doesn’t know what his question is going to be. “How are you doing that?”

Emily looks up at him, and her smile wavers slightly, sensing his concern-- his fear.

“It’s just a game, Corvo.”


	6. Nine of Wands

The smell of fish pie has soaked through the whole first floor, salty and savory while it bakes. The girls are having fun, Callista teaching Emily how to make crusts and pastries, Emily throwing flour on them both and Callista throwing it back when Corvo isn’t looking. The mood is light; the sun is even shining through the boarded-up windows of the first story. He’s evicted himself from the kitchen to give them space to bond, and to avoid starting a dough-ball fight, or void only knows what else, but that leaves him pacing around the rest of the house, smelling supper and restless.

He’s peeking out from between the boards of the front-facing windows, where golden light is streaming in, when he hears a creak from the top of the stairs.

Corvo jerks around to look up the stairwell, rising up to the second floor just behind him. There’s no one there.

He steps closer, eyes sweeping up the stairwell. Its modeling looks original to the house, situated in the center of the entryway, like an old woman trying to hold the house up on the back of her aging bones. The sound he’d heard was distinct. He ascends the stairwell quickly, and just as he’d heard before, the top boards of the stairs creak.

Corvo stops there, his eyes shifting across the hall and the entryways he can see, but not for long. Above him, on the third floor, he hears footsteps-- heavier than Callista, even stomping, but she couldn’t possibly--

As quietly as he can, Corvo slips around to the third story staircase, above the second story, and hops the banister to creep up the rest of the way. The footsteps quiet before he reaches the top, but they stopped near his bedroom. He feels a prickle at the back of his neck as he peeks out at the third story, more brightly lit than either the second or first-- practically sunny-- and desolate. There’s no one here.

The door to his bedroom is shut, as he left it. He turns the handle. It opens, and he looks inside.

It looks empty.

He steps inside, checking the corners, underneath the bed, the wardrobe, the locks on the trunks. It looks empty.

It _is_ empty, Corvo tells himself. That doesn’t comfort him.

Behind him, loud and clear, there’s a knock on the open door.

Corvo feels like he’s swallowed water as he turns, panic rising in his throat like something asphyxiating, because almost as he expects, there’s no one there.

Just by his ear, as smooth as river mud, there’s a voice: “Hello, Corvo.”

Corvo doesn’t turn this time. His heart feels as if it might burst his ribs. “Who’s there?” he asks. He gets no response. Then: “Have you been talking to Emily?”

The voice is on the other side of the room, still behind him, now. “You don’t need to worry. Emily and I are friends. I’m not going to hurt her.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“You don’t have to.”

Corvo turns. There’s a visceral shock, still, when the room remains empty.

“You’re the black-eyed one,” he says. “In Emily’s drawings.”

No answer.

“What is it you _want_?”

“To answer your question,” Corvo hears, once again much too close for his liking, “I’m not going to hurt or rob your daughter. Emily is perfectly safe here.”

“I didn’t ask that,” Corvo growls.

“Yes, you did.”

“Why are you doing this? Why are you here?”

“Because, Corvo--” He feels a set of fingertips trail over his shoulders. “I can’t leave.”

Whether the conversation is over or not-- and maybe it is-- Corvo’s mind feels like it’s beneath rushing floodwaters, too fast and heavy to think clearly. He slams the bedroom door behind himself when he leaves, and forgets to descend past the second floor staircase; Emily has to come fetch him an hour later for dinner, and finds him staring off into the peeling yellow flowers on the wall, lost in thought.


	7. The Moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: mention of suicide, possibly vague body horror.

Corvo can’t sleep. It’s been two days since the conversation, and he thinks he understands now what Emily meant by _playing games_ : things not where he left them-- windows unlatched and banging open in the wind-- whistles and laughs and whispers he isn’t able to place. Emily watches the way he looks at the house now, looks at the empty spaces in it, and he can tell that she knows. He’s not sure what to ask her, though. He doesn’t know the words. Not yet.

It’s somewhere between midnight and morning, and Corvo hasn’t slept yet. An hour ago he stopped thrashing in bed to pace the room. Now, he stops pacing, and opens the window to the whipping night air. He edges onto the rooftop, creeping backwards to lean against the peak of the roof, staring up at the dark sky.

The wind murmurs around him. The sounds of the city are out there, untraceable but present, smothered under the blanket of night. Somewhere, a baby crying; dogs barking; voices shouting. Carriage wheels. All invisible. Other people’s lives. Corvo isn’t sure he would want to know if he could. He lets his head drop back against the rooftop, staring up at the murky clouds.

“Corvo.”

Corvo nearly tears the elbows of his shirt open when he jerks upright, twisting on instinct to look for the source. He’s expecting another game-- more anonymous taunting, whatever kind of trickery this has been. But hearing that voice again-- so unmistakably clear, like water poured over his head-- is a shock itself.

“You,” Corvo says. “What do you want?”

“To talk,” says the voice beside him, suddenly, and when Corvo turns his head to look, he’s looking into a pair of bottomless black eyes.

Corvo lurches the other way, and catches himself on his elbow.

“Don’t fall,” the stranger says, mildly.

Corvo doesn’t answer. He just stares.

The man-- is he a man?-- his face is a shallow grave, his cheekbones prominent and his eyes dark even where they aren’t black like pitch. Corvo has no idea what wearing-- he’s never seen the style before but it looks old-fashioned, smeared with dirt and stained black. His skin is bloodless.

“Talk about what?” Corvo’s voice is low. He’s not sure how steady it would be any louder. The black-eyed man doesn’t seem to struggle to hear him over the rustle of the wind.

“Do you never want to just have a conversation, Corvo?” The man tilts his head to the side, watching him. “All the times you’ve felt alone in this house, and you don’t want to just… talk?”

Corvo narrows his eyes. “Not until you give me some answers.”

“So ask.”

“Who are you?”

“I don’t have a name.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

The man pulls his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around them. “I’ve been here for a very long time,” he says, calmly. “Longer than you’ve been alive. Longer than your parents’ lives. No one even remembers what Dunwall was really like when I came to this house, and I’m still here now. Sitting with you, on the roof. You’re not the first person I’ve talked to, Corvo, but you might be one of the most interesting.”

Corvo feels the dizziness slam into him like a fever, leaving his limbs feeling separate from his body and dread settle deep in his stomach. His bones ache from the cold.

“You don’t know me,” Corvo hears himself saying.

“No,” says the stranger with the black eyes. “But I’ve been watching you.”

“You said you can’t leave.”

“That was true.”

“Why?” Corvo asks.

The man tilts his head again. “That’s an interesting question. If you jump off this building, why can’t you get up again?”

Corvo tears his eyes away, and stares up at the sky. The clouds seem thicker now, darker. How long have they been talking? When did he come outside? Corvo clears his throat. “If you just wanted to talk,” he says, word by word, “how did you think this conversation was going to go?”

“I had no idea, Corvo.” His tone breaks its detachment, surfacing into dubious amusement. “Why do you think I wanted to have it?”

“And now?”

“Now,” the man taps his mouth, “I think maybe you should try to get some sleep.”

The man disappears as suddenly as he arrived, only this time, it’s in front of Corvo’s eyes, just winking out like a snuffed candle.

Corvo doesn’t move, staring at the place where the stranger was before, seeming so solid and now seeming like a figment from a dream. Three stories up, sitting on his rooftop in the middle of the night, he’s certain he’s being watched, too.

Eventually, when he’s more confident that his limbs are connected to his body, and that he won’t slip to his death, Corvo climbs back in through the window. He locks it behind himself-- not that that means much anymore.

His mind should be racing, but somehow, he’s exhausted. He doesn’t sleep, though-- not without making the quiet pilgrimage to Emily’s room, just to be sure all is well.

As usual this time of night, she’s deep asleep. The only sign of a dark-haired man with black eyes is in the paper drawings littering her room, spilling out from underneath her bed in careless stacks. Before Corvo closes the door, Emily rolls over and buries her face in her pillow.

He goes back to his room, and although he’s not sure if he’s alone or not, Corvo falls asleep almost immediately. He dreams of Jessamine-- always of Jessamine-- but he also dreams of crows that talk and whistle, and black lakes so wide he can never row to shore, and the basement door of the house.

When Corvo wakes, it’s just after dawn, and he’s still alone.


End file.
